This blog connects to the AXEC Project which applies a superior method of economic analysis. The following comments have been posted on selected blogs as catalysts for the ongoing paradigm shift. The comments are brought together here for information. The full debates are directly accessible via the Blog-References. Scrap the lot and start again - that is what a paradigm shift is all about. Time to make economics a science.

March 27, 2017

The non-existence of economics

Comment on Simon Wren-Lewis on ‘On criticising the existence of mainstream economics’

There is no such thing as economics, there are FOUR economixes and they are constantly played against each other. First, there is theoretical and political economics. The crucial distinction within theoretical economics is true/false, the crucial distinction within political economics good/bad. Economics exhausts itself since 200+ years in crossover discussion, that is, by NOT keeping science and politics properly apart. As a result, it got neither science nor politics right.

Heterodox economists say that orthodox economics is false and in this very general sense, they are right. Heterodox economists have debunked much of Orthodoxy but this has not enabled them to work out a superior alternative. The proper task of Heterodoxy is not the repetitive critique of Orthodoxy but to fully replace it, that is, to perform a paradigm shift: “The problem is not just to say that something might be wrong, but to replace it by something ― and that is not so easy.” (Feynman)

Because Heterodoxy has never developed a valid alternative it advocates pluralism, more precisely, the pluralism of false theories. The argument boils down to: if Orthodoxy is allowed to sell their rubbish in the curriculum, Heterodoxy must also be allowed to sell their rubbish. Economics is not so much a heroic struggle about scientific truth but about a better place at the academic trough.

The fact of the matter is that neither Orthodoxy nor Heterodoxy has the true theory and that, by consequence, the political arguments of BOTH sides have NO sound scientific foundation.

Traditional Heterodoxy knows quite well that it has nothing to offer in the way of progressive science and therefore argues for dumping scientific standards altogether and to focus on politics pure and simple: “The case against austerity does not depend on whether it is ‘good economics’, but on its human impact. Nor does the case for combating climate change depend on the present discounted value of future costs to GDP. Reclaiming political debate from the grip of economics will make the human side of politics more central, and so can only serve a progressive purpose.”

This is a good idea, economists should no longer pretend to do science but openly push their respective political agendas, after all, this is what they have actually done the past 200+ years. Neither Orthodoxy nor traditional Heterodoxy satisfies the scientific criteria of material and formal consistency. So, both, orthodox and heterodox economists have to get out of science because of incurable incompetence.

It was John Stuart Mill who told economists that they must decide themselves between science and politics: “A scientific observer or reasoner, merely as such, is not an adviser for practice. His part is only to show that certain consequences follow from certain causes, and that to obtain certain ends, certain means are the most effectual. Whether the ends themselves are such as ought to be pursued, and if so, in what cases and to how great a length, it is no part of his business as a cultivator of science to decide, and science alone will never qualify him for the decision.”

Both, orthodox and heterodox economists violate the principle of the separation of science and politics on a daily basis. Economics is what Feynman famously called cargo cult science and neither right wing nor left wing economic policy guidance has a sound scientific foundation since Adam Smith/Karl Marx. It is high time that economics frees itself from the corrupting grip of politics.

Economics is a cargo cult science. Feynman defined it thus: “They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. ... But it doesn’t work. ... So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential.”

What is missing among economists is a proper understanding of what science is all about.

You write: “… his [Vernon Smith’s] most famous experiments were ones in the early 1960s that showed that double auction markets will generally move very rapidly to conventional micro supply-demand equilibria. This fit with Vernon’s view that properly structured markets tend to work well, and he has long had a pretty pro-laissez faire view, including a very positive attitude towards Hayek as well as of Adam Smith.”

Vernon Smith’s blunder consists in concluding from the satisfactory functioning of one market that the market system as a whole functions well, i.e. is stable. This is the Fallacy of Composition which is the defining blunder of scientifically incompetent economists. The fact of the matter is that the grand claim of Adam Smith, Hayek, Arrow-Debreu et al. about the functioning of the market system has NEVER been proven. In fact, just the opposite can be demonstrated.

With regard to the labor market as a whole follows from the fallacy of composition: “We economists have all learned, and many of us teach, that the remedy for excess supply in any market is a reduction in price. If this is prevented by combinations in restraint of trade or by government regulations, then those impediments to competition should be removed.” (Tobin)

From the correct employment theory follows that an INCREASING average wage rate leads to INCREASING employment. This testable proposition asserts just the OPPOSITE of microfounded cargo cult economics.

The fallacy of composition follows ultimately from Walrasian microfoundations: “HC1 economic agents have preferences over outcomes; HC2 agents individually optimize subject to constraints; HC3 agent choice is manifest in interrelated markets; HC4 agents have full relevant knowledge; HC5 observable outcomes are coordinated, and must be discussed with reference to equilibrium states.” (Weintraub)

Methodologically, this behavioral axiom set is forever unacceptable. The Iron Law of Economic Methodology says: NO way leads from the understanding of human behavior to the understanding of how the monetary economy works. And this explains why the microfoundations approach has been doomed to failure from the very beginning.

It holds: (i) economic theory cannot be based on assumptions about human nature/ behavior/action, (ii) economics is NOT a social science but a system science, (iii) if it isn’t macro-axiomatized, it isn’t economics.

It is pretty obvious that Barkley Rosser has never grasped this and never will and this applies to the contributors, referees and readers of the Review of Behavioral Economics, the followers of Hayek, and all other scientifically retarded supply-demand-equilibrium economists.*

You said: “This fit with Vernon’s view that properly structured markets tend to work well, and he has long had a pretty pro-laissez faire view, including a very positive attitude towards Hayek as well as of Adam Smith.”

You said also: “He never made any statement about the general stability or instability of the market system as a whole, even though he is largely pro-laissez faire.”

Wikipedia says: “Being a system of thought, laissez-faire rests on the following axioms:
1. The individual is the basic unit in society.
2. The individual has a natural right to freedom.
3. The physical order of nature is a harmonious and self-regulating system.”

So laissez-faire = “harmonious and self-regulating system” = overall stability. This property has been put into the axioms of the laissez-faire doctrine. This methodological blunder is known since antiquity as petitio principii. Overall stability, which is compatible with partial and temporary instability, has to be PROVEN and NOT put into the premises.

By subscribing to laissez-faire Vernon Smith indeed made a statement about the general stability of the market system. This statement has always been false.*

There is genuine pluralism and look-alike pluralism. Heterodoxy advocates the wrong type. In science, pluralism is NOT a virtue, it is what Popper called an immunizing stratagem.

The scientific protocol demands (i) to tackle only questions that allow for clear-cut true/false results (and leave the rest to philosophical wafflers), (ii) to take only materially and formally consistent theories into the corpus of scientific knowledge, (iii) to throw out refuted theories.

Scientific ethic means that the scientific community relies on self-governance which in turn means that everybody sticks to the protocol and accepts refutation if it so happens. This, though, never worked in economics. Morgenstern reminded his fellow economists: “In economics we should strive to proceed, wherever we can, exactly according to the standards of the other, more advanced, sciences, where it is not possible, once an issue has been decided, to continue to write about it as if nothing had happened.”

The situation is this: the four main approaches ― Walrasianism, Keynesianism, Marxianism, Austrianism ― are mutually contradictory, axiomatically false, materially/formally inconsistent, and all got the pivotal concept of the subject matter, i.e. profit, wrong. So, what we have is the pluralism of false theories. Economics is a failed science but Walrasianism, Keynesianism, Marxianism, Austrianism is still around “as if nothing had happened.” Methodology has been softened to the point of anything-goes by economists to rationalize overt failure.#1 Blaug called this playing tennis with the net down.

Because the representative economist is NOT a scientist but an agenda pusher he feels quite at home in the swamp where “nothing is clear and everything is possible” (Keynes) The beauty of vagueness and ambiguity and inconclusiveness is that it cannot be falsified: “Another thing I must point out is that you cannot prove a vague theory wrong.” (Feynman)

This has always been the life insurance of incompetent scientists. In economics, pluralism is an immunizing stratagem. There is theoretical economics (= science) and political economics (= agenda pushing). Theoretical economics is a failure and political economics is a fraud.

Economics needs a paradigm shift in order to overcome the pluralism of false theories. The takeaway for Heterodoxy and Blissex is: stop rationalizing and justifying proto-scientific methodological rubbish.

You say: “I am not someone who believes all mainstream economics is junk. That would be stupid. Mainstream economics is the product of a lot of smart people working for decades in an established paradigm.”

It is a matter of indifference what you believe. The scientific criteria are true/false with truth objectively defined as material and formal consistency. Science is NOT about belief but about PROOF.

Fact is: the four main approaches ― Walrasianism, Keynesianism, Marxianism, Austrianism ― are mutually contradictory, axiomatically false, and materially/formally inconsistent. Not only mainstream economics is junk but heterodox economics, too.

The one thing that is common to all these failed approaches is that they do not get the fundamental economic concepts profit and income right. This is like medieval physics before the concepts of force, mass, energy, etc. were properly defined and understood.

You say: “Mainstream economics is the product of a lot of smart people working for decades in an established paradigm.” Yes, but this proves NOTHING. Geo-centrism was the product of smart people working more than 1500 years in an established paradigm. Unfortunately, this paradigm was FALSE and they were not smart enough to realize it.

The representative economist is not smart enough to realize that Walrasianism has already been dead in the cradle 140+ years ago and Keynesianism 80+ years ago.

Economics is proto-scientific junk but economists celebrate each year the ‘Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel’. The plural may well be a little excessive.

The hybrid science

As a first approximation, one can agree on the general characteristic that the economy is a complex system.

However, with the term system one usually associates a structure with components that are non-human. In order to stress the obvious fact that humans are an essential component of the economic system the market economy should be characterized more precisely as a complex hybrid human/system entity or sys-hum.

The scientific method is straightforwardly applicable to the sys-component but not to the hum-component. While it is clear that the economy always has to be treated as an indivisible whole, for good methodological reasons the analysis has to start with the objective system-component.

In gestalt-psychological terms the economic system is the foreground, individual behavior the background. Common sense wrongly insists that the hum-component must always be in the foreground. This fallacy compares to Geo-centrism. The economic system has its own logic which is different from the behavioral logic of humans. The systemic logic is what Adam Smith called the Invisible Hand.

There are systemic laws but no behavioral laws. Systemic laws have the same methodological status as physical laws.

Neither Orthodoxy nor Heterodoxy can tell what the systemic laws of the actual monetary economy are.

Whether the outcome of the human/system-interaction is good or bad is a politcal question that lies outside of theoretical economics. Theoretical economics explains how the actual economy works - no less, no more.

First Economic Law ®

Narrative vs.Theory

Psychological, sociological or behavioral assumptionism cannot yield anything other than a gossip model of the world. Second-guessing the agents is not economic analysis.

Storytelling is the original mode of communication in the social realm — except science.

Political economics is storytelling and, by default, the natural habitat of confused confusers. Walrasianism, Keynesianism, Marxianism, Austrianism are social narratives and not scientifically valid representations of reality.

"The truth is, most persons, not excepting professional economists, are satisfied with very hazy notions." (Fisher)

In marked contrast, theoretical economics lives up to the standards of material and formal consistency. A scientific theory is the best mental representation of reality that is humanly possible.

Getting rid of proto-scientific rubbish

If an economist starts painting two crossing lines, you know for sure you have an idiot before you. Throw him out without further ado.

Paradigm shift

"The problem is not just to say that something might be wrong, but to replace it by something — and that is not so easy." (Feynman)

"As will become evident, there is more agreement on the defects of orthodox theory than there is on what theory is to replace it: but all agreed that the point of the criticism is to clear the ground for construction." (Nell)

"The moral of the story is simply this: it takes a new theory, and not just the destructive exposure of assumptions or the collection of new facts, to beat an old theory." (Blaug)

"The task of producing knowledge against the grain requires imagination." (Mirowski)

"A new idea is extremely difficult to think of. It takes a fantastic imagination." (Feynman)

"The scientific imagination dreams of explanations and laws." (Peirce)

"It is brilliance of imagination which makes the glory of science." (Evans)

"... we know little more now about ‘how the economy works,’ ... than we knew in 1790, after Adam Smith completed the last revision of The Wealth of Nations." (Clower)

The Starting Problem or What are your axioms?

"What are the propositions which may reasonably be received without proof? That there must be some such propositions all are agreed, since there cannot be an infinite series of proof, a chain suspended from nothing. But to determine what these propositions are, is the opus magnum of the more recondite mental philosophy."

To be replaced (1)

The core premises of Orthodoxy are uncertain and false and this fully explains the failure of the research program.

“As with any Lakatosian research program, the neo-Walrasian program is characterized by its hard core, heuristics, and protective belts. Without asserting that the following characterization is definitive, I have argued that the program is organized around the following propositions: HC1 economic agents have preferences over outcomes; HC2 agents individually optimize subject to constraints; HC3 agent choice is manifest in interrelated markets; HC4 agents have full relevant knowledge; HC5 observable outcomes are coordinated, and must be discussed with reference to equilibrium states.” (Weintraub)

This elementary syllogism is demonstrably false. The demonstration consists in the proof that Keynes could not solve the Profit Puzzle. Neither did Post-Neo-New-Keynesians.

In the most general terms, the economics paradigm shift consists in switching from the behavior-centric bottom-up approach to the structure-centric top-down approach. This is comparable to the Copernican turn from Geo-centrism to Helio-centrism.

Paradigm shift

Walrasianism, Keynesianism, Marxianism, Austrianism is provably false and this requires the shift to an entirely new paradigm

AXEC meme

Consensus

Economics is a science without scientists. Because they are ignorant of the elementary difference between profit and income, the present generation of economists has not made and cannot make a significant contribution to the discussion about how the actual economy works.

Every orthodox or heterodox economist can convince himself/herself that their profit theory is defective.

Because the profit theory is false the whole of conventional economic theory has to be rejected.

"What is now taught as standard economic theory will eventually disappear, no trace of it will remain in the universities or boardrooms because it simply doesn’t work: were it engineering, the bridge would collapse." (McCauley)

No scientist will ever accept Walrasianism, Keynesianism, Marxianism, or Austrianism. These approaches are logically and/or empirically refuted. This is the actual methodological state-of-the-art. Walrasians, Keynesians, Marxians, or Austrians are still at the proto-scientific stage. These approaches cannot be improved, only abandoned.

Economists are a public nuisance because they have an opinion on everything but knowledge of nothing.

About me

Nopopop

This blog does not add to any popular/un- popular opinion.

This blog does not hand out advice about how to avoid taxes, to get rich on the stock market, to be successful in business, to increase the wealth of nations, to run an economy, to maximize welfare, to prevent national/global bankruptcy, to improve the institutional setup of society, to get out of national/global depression, nor about how to save humankind or any subgroup thereof.

This blog is about the true theory of the actual monetary economy.

"In order to tell the politicians and practitioners something about causes and best means, the economist needs the true theory or else he has not much more to offer than educated common sense or his personal opinion." (Stigum)

Redefining economics

Old definition, subjective-behavioral:

Economics is the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.

New definition, objective-systemic:

Economics is the science which studies how the monetary economy works.

From proto-science to science

Political economics is scientifically worthless since more than 200 years

Focus

Science is of primary interest and importance. Scientists are of secondary interest.

With regard to science, most people lose focus easily because of a natural preference for anecdotes and gossip over facts or subjectivity over objectivity.

Hence, Schumpeter once considered it necessary to remind his habitually disoriented fellow economists: “Remember: occasionally, it may be an interesting question to ask why a man says what he says; but whatever the answer, it does not tell us anything about whether what he says is true or false.”

Disclaimer

Missing Blog-Reference links: AXEC does not guarantee that their comments can at any time be recovered from where they have been posted intitially because the availability depends on the publication policy of the blog owner which is implicitly accepted on entering a debate. See also: 'Economists: Incompetent? Stupid? Corrupt?'

Texts: Parts of arbitrary length of any of the author's texts is and will be used again by the author in papers, books, websites, blogs, and other media without explicit reference. The right to make corrections or minor textual improvements on reutilization is reserved.

Caution: Do not expect a corroboration of your political view. Neither a refutation. Political economics has been scientifically worthless since Adam Smith. Politics has to be separated from economics because it is categorically different from science.The best science can do and has always done is to prove beyond reasonable doubt that you have been objectively wrong or ignorant until now. Science goes beyond the naive common sense of today and becomes the sophisticated common sense of tomorrow.

Motto

The Scrap-the-lot citation in the intro is from Joan Robinson.

Outlook

To recall, while political economics is storytelling, theoretical economics adheres to scientific standards.

The first task of theoretical economics is to get the axiomatic foundations right. This is what J. S. Mill called the opus magnum. Neither Orthodoxy nor Heterodoxy came up with a reasonable solution until this day. This explains the secular stagnation of economics.

There is no serious alternative to structural axiomatic economics. This is not a matter of opinion but of proof. The sole criteria are material and formal consistency.

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.

Galileo Galilei

The Profit Law ®

The Law of Supply and Demand ®

The Employment Law ®

Time evolution of the economic system ®

The Economics God Equation embodies the open simulation of the pure production-consumption economy from t=0 to infinity

Major economic policy implication

The price mechanism does not work as standard economics hypothesizes. The axiom-based Employment Law states that overall employment increases if the average wage rate increases relative to average price and productivity. This gives one the lever to improve the employment situation all over the world and to fend off deflation without rising debt and without artificial capacity growth. To increase the average price relative to the average wage rate and productivity increases unemployment.

Right policy depends on true theory.

“In order to tell the politicians and practitioners something about causes and best means, the economist needs the true theory or else he has not much more to offer than educated common sense or his personal opinion.” (Stigum)

Lacking the true theory, economists promote since more than 200 years opinion instead of knowledge.